This Week: Awesome New Giveaways, Best Free Annual Family Festivals, Things to Do During Screen-Free Week

4/25/13 - By Raven Snook

Do you feel lucky? This week we have not one, not two but three great giveaways going on at Mommy Poppins. Enter to win an Earth Friendly Products gift basket chock-full of eco-friendly cleaning supplies; a professional portrait of your kids by artist Lori Nelson or a four pack of tickets to the Guggenheim Museum. Not only are the prizes eclectic, the methods of winning are as well. For the Earth Friendly Products and Lori Nelson portraits, all you need to do is enter to win. But for the Guggenheim giveaway, we're encouraging readers to take the kids to the museum's current exhibit Gutai, snap a pic and submit it to our Facebook or Pinterest pages. That giveaway is definitely the most fun and is totally in keeping with our site's mission of getting families out and about doing cool things with kids.

Speaking of fun family outings, festival season is in full swing, which inspired us to round up our top 25 FREE annual festivals. And would you believe three of our picks take place this very weekend?

Our other sites have also been busy sharing the best things to do this spring on Long Island, in New Jersey, Connecticut and beyond, but a few posts will be of particular interest to New York families. If your kids are begging to see the likes of Taylor Swift and One Direction live, NJ's got a roundup of concerts for tweens, most easily accessible from the city. Our LA site did an awesome post in honor of Screen-Free Week with 10 fun no-tech things to do with kids. And on a more somber note, our CT site has a heartfelt post about ways kids can volunteer in the wake of a tragedy. While some of the suggestions are local, there are also ideas that apply to families anywhere, like donating allowance or toys.

Here's what else we covered in NYC this week:

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Here's a post you're going to want to bookmark: The 25 best FREE annual festivals for families in NYC. Even if you can't make the three picks going on this weekend, there are 22 other top fests to hit throughout the year.

Williamsburg has a brand-new drop-in tot spot. Family-run Twinkle looks and feels more like a children's museum than a traditional play space.

There's lots for kids to love about the grown-up exhibit Gutai: Splendid Playground at the Guggenheim. If you do check it out, make sure you snap a pic so you can enter to win a four pack to the museum.

Our month-long focus on Midtown West ended with a roundup of the neighborhood's top five playgrounds and parks, including the lovely Bryant Park.

We were totally charmed by TADA! Youth Theater's new page-to-stage musical Adventures From Ezra Jack Keats.

Sure you've been to the Brooklyn Children's Museum but how about the nearby Jewish Children's Museum? You may be surprised at how much there is to do, including indoor mini-golf.

Even though we already had a post about great birthday bargains on Staten Island in our Party Guide, there are so many great choices we decided to spotlight 10 more SI party places.

Check out Lori Nelson's gorgeous children's portraits and then enter to win one of your kids.

Best bets for the weekend include Street Games, the Tribeca Family Festival Street Fair, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's Cherry Blossom Festival and many more.